


One shade the more, one ray the less,

by anomalousity



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Gentle Sex, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 13:12:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6567766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalousity/pseuds/anomalousity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Enjolras estate was something Grantaire had witnessed only twice in his lifetime, but he would never be able to forget it. The artist in him preened at the priceless artifacts; Michelangelos, Titians, Lancrets, Watteaus, and other masterpieces that Grantaire could spend days naming lined the halls, framed with bronze and gold. He was sure he could find a sculpture if he wandered near Enjolras’ mother's bed chambers; he was equally sure that the wing he was in must be Enjolras’ if only because of the sensible decor.</p><p>The debt-ridden student in him cringed at the casual display of wealth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One shade the more, one ray the less,

He woke with his cheek pressed against lavender-scented linens.

His ears were ringing and he was distantly aware of a terrible headache developing somewhere at the base of his skull. Moreover, he had lost his clothes at some point in the night and was faintly aware that underneath the sheets there was a naked limb pressed snug against his calf.

He didn’t know where he was but that didn’t matter; he saw a pair of abandoned gilt-toed loafers and sedated a cringe before twisting on his back and admiring the painted ceilings above him.

The Enjolras estate was something Grantaire had witnessed only twice in his lifetime, but he would never be able to forget it. The artist in him preened at the priceless artifacts; Michelangelos, Titians, Lancrets, Watteaus, and other masterpieces that Grantaire could spend days naming lined the halls, framed with bronze and gold. He was sure he could find a sculpture if he wandered near Enjolras’ mother's bed chambers; he was equally sure that the wing he was in must be Enjolras’ if only because of the sensible decor.

The debt-ridden student in him cringed at the casual display of wealth.

He pushed himself to his elbows and catalogued his varying aches and pains. Dimly, he remembered clinging to a soft hand as he surveyed the estate in awe; he recalled Éponine’s smug grin as their party explored the expansive gardens, and blushed at the ghost of Enjolras’ thumb sweeping over the back of his hand.

Of course, Grantaire discounted the memory. Enjolras would sooner embrace his family’s sprawling lands and claim his inheritance than deign to hold Grantaire’s hand. Additionally, Grantaire, while being in a bed in Enjolras’ rooms, refused to acknowledge the evidence lay before him: there was no way he and Enjolras had, over the time between the morning before and the morning at present, slipped nude between the sheets and performed all that was implicated at that.

He knew, without looking, that even if that had occurred, there was no distant ache between his legs telling him so. He also knew that, regardless of how he felt about Enjolras, the sentiment would never be returned. Enjolras was cold – marvelous and beatific and horrifyingly stunning – but he was a David given life without feeling. He was pristine marble without need of reshaping; a perfection without need of a pair.

No, he wasn’t bitter; he was wholly unsurprised, but not bitter. Sighing, he rolled to peer out the windows overlooking the east gardens and spotted lilacs in early bloom. April, Grantaire thought, was the gentlest month. Grim clouds lingered upon the horizon, threatening to spill before the day was done. He felt a vague contentment at the impeding rain shower; perhaps he would make his escape before its fall and get caught in a crosswind and carried away to some happy land where people didn’t end up sprawled spare on the softest bed in creation. Perhaps, he mused, it would send him somewhere with enough rum to blind him to any new intimations of golden curls and languid half-smiles.

He was succumbing to paranoid ideations that Éponine would wrinkle her nose at. Grantaire was aware he was a disappointment to her, to Azelma and Gavroche; to any other members of his ragtag distant family that still bothered to dote on him unselfishly. Regardless, he was unable to help but recognize his faults from the wrong crook of his brows to his deeply flawed personal character.

His mother still wrote him, sometimes. She asked after his studies and his friends; he had forgotten that she and Bahorel were intimately acquainted until she had inquired about his “not-law” law studies. He smiled at the phrasing. Of course Bahorel would instill unto her that he was most certainly not a third-year law student, nor was he planning on accepting an apprenticeship with the Procureur de la République.

She always seemed so curious, so proud in her words, that he could forget however briefly that he was a failed scientist, politician, revolutionary, as she had raised him to be. It did not matter that she was proud of his art and philosophy, nor did it matter that she was proud of him; it didn’t matter at all.

His mind was so lost to loathing that he almost didn’t notice when a lank arm was slung over his waist, a warm chest pressed to his spine.

He noticed when soft lips pressed between his shoulder blades and he was shocked still.

“Good morning,” came the sleepy greeting.

Grantaire could not answer.

The soft-padded fingertips of the hand brushed over his middle a single time, then repeated when they felt the reflexive clench of his abdominal muscles. The thumb skimmed the crest of his hipbone, pausing momentarily to dip towards his groin before returning to its careful sweep of his skin.

He could hardly breathe, let alone shift out of the welcoming arms. Instead, he relaxed into them, letting out some pent-up sigh he wasn’t aware he was containing. The chest behind him rumbled something like a laugh before the hand slid from his midriff down below his navel and down further until Grantaire couldn’t help but duck his chin and let a blush bloom unbidden on his cheeks.

If anyone had told him the night before that he would be roused by cool hands with a touch that was somehow both delicate and firm, he would have laughed in their face. As it was, he felt himself fidget into the soft bed, turned when summoned, and gasped when he’s pressed onto his back and climbed on top of.

“When people say ‘good morning’ you’re supposed to say it back,” Enjolras said, lips curled in a mischievous smirk.

Grantaire’s lips parted around a response that never quite reached formation; his thoughts were centered about a warm hand and a wan smile; a weight of blistering intellect and tousled blond curls.

Enjolras retained his vigor, even when he was as bare as the day he was born and had a hand pressed somewhere that wouldn’t normally warrant an expression of stern concentration. His back was not arched, nor was it slack; he was poised as though preparing for a fight. Grantaire couldn’t help but shiver at the heat in his eyes and wondered how, in those first days of their acquaintance, he had believed he hated Enjolras.

There was something savage about the emotion, about the dedication to control. Enjolras was never anything less than pristine, and Grantaire was finding this extended even to his bedside manner. The perpetual frown between his brows was faint, but still present. His lips, while curled, still retained a severity that, if called upon at this moment, could bring nations to their fall.

He found his hands reaching for Enjolras’ hips of their own accord. They curled, starkly dark compared to Enjolras’ alabaster tone, and settled, tips of his middle fingers resting at the dimples low on Enjolras’ back. He rubbed his thumbs over the hollows nestled within Enjolras’ hips. He kept his eyes on Enjolras as he examined the fall of eyelids over bright eyes, pupils chasing brilliant iris into a tiny ring.

Grantaire tried to voice how gorgeous Enjolras was, but it stuck in the back of his throat when Enjolras shifted backwards and caught him along the inside of one parted thigh.

He registered the slide of their skin, tacky where they were too dry to make anything work. He tried to focus on restraint. His fingers spasmed where they grasped soft skin, and slid up and up until he had one hand curled around Enjorlas’ nape and was pulling him down, angling their faces towards each other.

They breathed each other’s air for a moment; Grantaire shuttered his eyes and leaned up to brush his nose against silken skin, sighed at the sensation of it, before tilting his chin and pressing a kiss to the corner of Enjolras’ lips.

Enjolras made a soft sound when Grantaire slipped his tongue along the seam of his lips, and pulled away with a wrinkled nose and humor in his eyes. He said, “Relax,” like he was in control. Grantaire saw the flush on his cheeks, revealing previously concealed freckles along the bridge of his nose. His eyes, black with some hunger Grantaire couldn’t believe existed, kept him pinned where he lay, though he was sure the hand pressed to his sternum would be more than sufficient.

He tried to relax, but he could not. He basked.

A day, a mere smattering of hours, had found Enjolras in Grantaire’s arms, warm and willing, sharing awkward kisses and languorous slides of flesh against flesh.

They were lazy enough in their ministrations that rays of sunlight slew into the room before they collapsed sweaty and breathless onto warm sheets. Enjolras, in a move remarkably uncharacteristic of his usual posture, slumped into a sprawl with half of his body pinning Grantaire. His breath was warm where he mouthed along Grantaire’s neck, lips sweet where they pushed half-formed kisses against the still too hot skin.

Grantaire traced the contours of Enjolras’ back, eyes focused on a particularly plump cherub painted on the ceiling. “I will never understand your mother’s taste.”

He felt a huff of laughter before Enjolras twisted in his arms and followed his gaze. “It’s an imitation,” he said, lips twisting when he noticed Grantaire’s surprise. “She had it commissioned when I left for Paris.”

“Did she think it would keep you here?” Grantaire asked. He knew, as well as any of their friends, that Enjolras’ taste in art could stand to be improved.

“If she did, she wasted a lot of money.” His smile grew roguish at this, and he jabbed a finger towards an impeccable copy of a Monet. “A friend of ours paid for college with that one,” he says.

Grantaire raised a brow. “Are all of them fakes?” he asked, gesturing at the paintings in the room in general.

“No.” A pointed finger directed him towards a humble sketch framed atop the right nightstand. “I seem to have an original R in my possession. Perhaps you hadn’t heard, but apparently he’s an up and comer.”

He felt a blush bloom on his cheeks and spread to his hairline. “You didn’t have it framed.”

Enjolras stifled a snicker. “No,” he replied. “That was Jehan.”

Grantaire snorted. “I’m not surprised.”

Enjolras explained more about the pieces of art in the room, nodding along when Grantaire correctly identified a fake, explaining the real artist when he could not. Eventually, when they caught their breath and the feeling returned to their limbs, they paraded nude through the chambers, occasionally stopping when Grantaire asked a question Enjolras did not have the answer to.

When that happened, they intimated about the unknown artist, imagining great kings tired of politic painting as a hobby and selling to bourgeois who had too much money in their pocket than they knew what to do with. Grantaire found a portrait of a rather unfortunate looking man and suggested that it was, indeed, a self-portrait of a beautiful child. When Enjolras asked why, he replied why not.

Their day breezed by quickly, pausing for periods of time to go back to bed and study each other’s bodies more thoroughly, pausing to discuss philosophy, pausing to fight as they do, pausing to make up and kiss for hours. They hadn’t spared a thought to the world outside of the ones they had imagined.

Eventually, the sun set and Enjolras rested his back against Grantaire’s chest where they sat before the fire. They didn’t speak of tomorrows or of any of their worries; Grantaire brushed his fingers through a tangle of blond curls and Enjolras hummed at the feeling.

Grantaire watched the trek of the moon as it slowly rose onto the rambling lawns and drew his fingers in aimless patterns across his lover’s chest.

It wouldn’t last forever, he knew. It couldn’t. But that didn’t mean he wouldn’t savor the moment when the man he loved so stubbornly had finally allowed him to hold him.

**Author's Note:**

> fight me on [tumblr](http://frouvaire.tumblr.com).
> 
> title stolen from 'she walks in beauty'.


End file.
